Sunday, January 13, 2013

Why call it terrorism?

This
past week I attended a lecture by a political scientist distinguished for her
research on causes and effects of terrorism.Her review of prior literature included her choice of operational
definition of the word.She acknowledged
controversy in the field over definition.Her definition was designed to include the widest possible array of
national data sets in her own database.To begin with, only non-state actors can by definition do terrorism;
state sponsorship is irrelevant, except as to whether non-state actors are
foreign nationals.Second, those defined
as terrorist don’t also make war on military targets or installations.Third, their weapons of choice are bombs or
improvised explosive devices, so that those who instead burn down villages and
gun down, rape and kidnap women and children don’t count, and neither would
bombs and missiles if those the US government doesn’t recognize as state actors
could afford to have them.The data on
these terrorists alone can then be compared to militarized national resistance
movements that do not use bombs and ieds in public gathering places.While the definition of terrorism may be
politically loaded, the research within the research paradigm remains
value-free—a data base for purely objective scientific study.

Never
mind that family members and friends who help lay bombs along Afghan roads aim
to drive out forces who shoot up and rain fire on their homes by state
authority—that war persists where fire is met with equally righteous fire.Never mind that making peace entails
transforming mutual condemnation and intervention into mutual respect and
dignity for one another’s motives—from judgment to empathy.Peacemaking entails abandonment of pretense
of moral superiority.It entails obedience
to a cardinal principle of conflict resolution: no name calling.Warfare is fueled whenever we define a group
of “them” as different from “us”—in this case confining the study of terrorists
to the study of those the US government does not recognize as state
actors.This is the international
relations equivalent of criminologists defining the problem of violence as the
problem of the criminal.The impetus for
what has become known as critical criminology came alive in the late sixties
when the US justice department took over domination of research funding, and
some of us criticized mainstream criminologists as servants of the state.It appears the same can be said for limiting
the study of policies of knowingly killing civilians to the kinds of people the
US government is prepared to recognize as terrorist “perps.”You may want to learn how to identify and
treat actual and potential terrorists as “humanely” as some criminologists
propose to substitute treatment of offenders for punishment, but the problem
remains limited to doing something to those our states define as our enemies.

I have
been wrestling with accounting for my own religiosity in my recent posts.Suppose I turn the question of whether I am
distinctly religious on its head:How do
those social scientists who bound their research populations by the kind of
data governments collect and use, defend the “scientific validity” of their
findings as “best evidence” for “best practices” to apply to people other than
themselves, if not on religious faith that their data are more “empirical” than
the experience of those they purport to know about?How can some be competent to speak for what “we”
know about “them” without presuming to be closer to godliness?Diagnosing and treating people as problem categories
requires a kind of religious faith I don’t have, a cause for war rather than a
remedy.Love and peace--hal

1 comment:

I like this. I can tell you are really smart by the vocabulary and syntax (<-- I think that's the correct word). I had to read some parts a few times to fully understand your arguements but that is my shortcoming. I believe that the definition of terrorism is changing, and that the studies are as shaky as the definition. You made a great point about war being fueled by an "us" and "them" pretense, and everyone on this planet could benefit from a bit of selflessness and brotherhood. I worry sometimes that one day the concept of terrorism will be manipulated into a label of condemnation used at the governments fancy in a way that the term "heresy" used to condemn people. :/ I hope that even if you disagree with my opinions that I atleast wrote them in a way that you can understand the point I am trying to convey.

About Me

I retired Jan. 2009 from after 33 years on the criminal justice faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington. I continue not to charge for any form of public service, including speaking and consulting, and now have plenty of free time to do so on request. I do not do social networking. I regularly monitor just one email account: pepinsky@indiana.edu; my home phone number is 1-614-885-6341; my skype name is halpep. My papers and such are archived at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?brand=general&docId=InU-Ar-VAA9639.xml&doc.view=entire_text.
I am known as a co-founder of "peacemaking criminology." Page proofs of my latest, 2006 U of Ottawa Press book, Peacemaking: Reflections of a Radical Criminologist, are freely available at http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf , the end of which lists my publications, nine books and over 80 articles and chapters in all, on a wide range of subjects from the international to the interpersonal level. My preceding book, A Criminologist's Quest for Peace, is also freely available at http://critcrim.org/pepinsky, and a pdf of Myths That Cause Crime is on the critcrim.org home page.